Before We Become Fans: How Television Teaches Us to Care About Sport

A football manager who knows almost nothing about football should not be the person who explains the game to a global audience.

Yet that is precisely what Ted Lasso achieved.

When the series first arrived in 2020, its fictional American coach approached English football much as an unfamiliar viewer might: confused by relegation, surprised by local customs and uncertain about the rules. Ted's ignorance became an invitation. Audiences did not need to understand formations or transfer windows before entering AFC Richmond's world because he did not understand them either.

Six years later, Ted Lasso is more than a successful sports comedy. Its fourth season began streaming on Apple TV on 5 August 2026, returning Ted to Richmond to coach a second-division women's team. New episodes are being released weekly through 7 October. The change in setting feels particularly significant: a show that helped introduce international audiences to English club football is now turning its attention towards the women's game. Apple confirmed the new season's storyline and release schedule.

Its reach is difficult to dismiss as fan enthusiasm alone. Nielsen named Ted Lasso the most-watched original streaming programme in the United States in 2023, despite Apple TV having a smaller footprint than several competing platforms. The series also won consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series.

At almost the same moment, Running Point has been doing something similar for professional basketball. The Netflix comedy follows Isla Gordon, played by Kate Hudson, as she takes control of the fictional Los Angeles Waves and attempts to establish her authority inside a family-owned franchise and a male-dominated industry.

Its second season arrived in April 2026 and entered Netflix's global English-language television chart at number two, with 5.3 million views in its opening period. The first season had previously topped the same chart with 12.2 million views in one week. Netflix's viewing figures confirm that the series found an audience well beyond dedicated basketball followers.

Neither series is primarily about winning matches.

Ted Lasso is about leadership, mental health, masculinity and belonging. Running Point is about ownership, succession, family power and the credibility demanded of women in executive positions. Football and basketball provide the setting, but the stories invite viewers into the human and institutional structures surrounding the game.

That may be the real power of sports entertainment. It does not simply show us how a sport is played. It tells us why we might care.

The imagined club and the real industry

Running Point is fictional, but its foundations are recognisable.

Isla Gordon was inspired by Los Angeles Lakers controlling owner and president Jeanie Buss, who serves as an executive producer alongside longtime Lakers executive Linda Rambis. Elements of Buss's experience—including the pressure of leading a celebrated family organisation and navigating a male-dominated league—were adapted for the comedy.

Buss contributed knowledge about trades, agents, media leaks, player relationships and the instability of professional sports management. At the same time, she and the creators have been clear that the show is not a biopic. Isla's sudden promotion, her family complications and the Waves' crises have been accelerated and rearranged for entertainment. Buss explained the relationship between her experience and the fictional story in an interview published by Netflix.

This is the first rule of sports fiction: access to the truth does not require literal reproduction of it.

A real trade can take weeks of negotiation, legal work, salary calculations and cautious conversations. On television, it may need to happen between breakfast and the end of an episode. A team's organisational structure is simplified so that viewers can remember the characters. Several real executives may be compressed into one fictional role. A season's worth of tension can be concentrated into a single game.

The details may be imaginative, yet the central pressures can remain authentic: owners treat players as both people and financial assets; families confuse inheritance with competence; agents influence decisions; private disagreements become public stories; and women in positions of authority are judged in ways their male colleagues are not.

Ted Lasso performs the same balancing act from the dressing room rather than the executive suite.

AFC Richmond is not a real club, its sporting trajectory is highly improbable, and its football tactics sometimes serve the emotional requirements of an episode more than the logic of elite competition. But the series recognises other truths: a player can be celebrated and profoundly isolated; a dressing room contains status, insecurity and cultural difference; a coach's influence is psychological as well as tactical; and professional success does not protect a person from anxiety.

The series is not an accurate manual for running a Premier League club. It is an emotionally convincing interpretation of what leadership might feel like inside one.

Sport has always needed stories

Long before streaming, cinema helped create the language through which audiences understood athletes.

Rocky, released in 1976, did not teach viewers very much about the ordinary economics or administration of professional boxing. It offered something more durable: the athlete as an overlooked outsider who earns dignity through discipline. Victory was redefined. Rocky Balboa did not need to win the final fight; lasting the distance was enough.

That story became so powerful that it escaped the film. Running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art became a real-world ritual. A fictional boxer created one of the most recognisable pieces of sporting geography in America.

The danger of such success is that an archetype can begin to replace reality. Not every athlete is an underdog. Effort does not reliably overcome differences in funding, opportunity or physical ability. Sporting careers are also shaped by contracts, injuries, politics and chance. But the Rocky myth persists because it provides a simple emotional structure: struggle, sacrifice, transformation.

Later films moved the camera away from the athlete and towards the industry.

Jerry Maguire made the sports agent a central popular figure, translating representation, loyalty and commercial value into a personal drama. Its version of the profession was romantic and highly stylised, but it introduced mass audiences to the uneasy relationship between an athlete's humanity and his market price.

Any Given Sunday presented professional American football as a collision between coaches, owners, doctors, players, money and physical damage. Its locker rooms and boardrooms were heightened for cinema, yet the film challenged the comforting idea that a team is always a harmonious family. Sport was shown as a workplace in which different people could depend on one another while pursuing incompatible interests.

Then Moneyball gave the front office its own heroic story.

Based on Michael Lewis's book about Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, the 2011 film turned player valuation and statistical analysis into drama. It simplified the Athletics' success and created the fictional composite character Peter Brand, but it gave the public a vocabulary for a genuine transformation in professional baseball.

After Moneyball, "analytics" no longer belonged only to specialist conversations. It became a way for ordinary viewers to debate recruitment, efficiency and institutional resistance. Major League Baseball itself has described how data-led thinking spread through front offices and influenced almost every part of the modern game. The film did not invent that revolution, but it gave the revolution a face, a conflict and a memorable story.

This is one of the screen's most significant effects on sport: it makes invisible work visible.

Who is allowed to imagine themselves on the field?

Some sports stories change attention not by revealing an industry, but by widening the public's idea of who can participate in it.

When Bend It Like Beckham appeared in 2002, women's club football in England received a fraction of its current coverage and did not yet have a fully professional domestic league. The film followed Jess, a British-Indian teenager negotiating family expectations, cultural identity and her ambition to play.

Its football was accessible, joyful and imperfectly resourced. The players trained in public spaces, worried about their futures and imagined opportunities abroad. The film did not predict the precise development of the women's game, but it made a female footballer's ambition visible to audiences who had rarely encountered that story in mainstream cinema.

Its influence cannot be isolated neatly from the wider growth of women's football, but players and viewers have repeatedly described it as a cultural reference point. BBC Sport's twentieth-anniversary assessment recorded its lasting importance to women who recognised their own sporting and cultural experiences in the film.

Friday Night Lights achieved something different. Beginning as a book, then becoming a film and television drama, it used high-school American football to study an entire community. The game was not presented simply as entertainment. It shaped education, family expectations, race, status and the economic identity of a town.

The television series fictionalised its characters and setting, but it was often more revealing about sporting culture than a literal account of one season might have been. Viewers could see how much adult ambition was placed on young athletes and how a community's need to believe in a team could become both supportive and destructive.

The sport was real. The characters were invented. The social system surrounding them was recognisable.

When "behind the scenes" becomes a genre

Streaming has created another category: the sports programme that promises reality rather than fiction.

Formula 1: Drive to Survive is the most influential modern example. When it launched in 2019, Formula One could be intimidating to a new viewer. Its technology was complex, its regulations extensive and its international season difficult to enter halfway through.

The Netflix series converted that complexity into character.

Instead of asking viewers to begin with tyre strategies and aerodynamic regulations, it introduced ambitious drivers, anxious team principals, internal rivalries and precarious careers. Once the audience cared about the people, understanding the races became easier.

Formula One openly credits the programme with attracting younger and newer followers. The championship says the series has changed how fans enter and interact with the sport, and estimates that a substantial portion of its present audience first discovered Formula One through Netflix. It also inspired a family of similar productions about golf, tennis, cycling, rugby and athletics. Formula One's own examination of the series describes its effect on fandom and racing culture.

This is perhaps the clearest evidence that screen storytelling can popularise a sport. People who had never watched a Grand Prix began choosing favourite drivers and teams. Team principals became recognisable public personalities. Technical competition was reframed as continuing human drama.

Documentary sport may contain real people and real results, but it still requires narrative.

But documentary access does not remove imagination from the process.

Hundreds of hours are selected, shortened and rearranged into a limited number of episodes. Comments are given new context through editing. Some rivalries become central while others disappear. A driver can be constructed as the hero of one episode and an obstacle in another.

Documentary sport may contain real people and real results, but it still requires narrative. It creates protagonists, suspense and resolution from events that were less orderly when they happened.

In this sense, Drive to Survive and Ted Lasso are not complete opposites. One begins with reality and shapes it into a story. The other begins with fiction and fills it with recognisable truths.

The accuracy question

We often ask whether a sports film or series is realistic, as if realism were a single test. It is more useful to ask three separate questions.

Are the rules and sporting details correct?

Does the institution behave like a real club, league or business?

Does the story capture something emotionally true about the people inside it?

Very few productions succeed equally at all three.

A technically accurate match can sit inside an implausible business story. A wildly compressed front-office comedy can express something genuine about power. A documentary can show real conversations while manipulating the viewer's understanding of when and why they occurred.

The best sports stories are not necessarily the ones with the fewest inventions. They are the ones that understand what they are inventing—and do not confuse emotional truth with factual authority.

This distinction matters because popular entertainment can become the public's principal source of knowledge. Viewers who have never worked inside a professional club may assume that transfers resemble Running Point, coaching resembles Ted Lasso or team rivalries resemble Drive to Survive.

The production therefore has influence even when it makes no claim to education. It can shape attitudes towards owners, agents, athletes, supporters and entire sports.

From viewer to supporter

A sports story succeeds when the audience begins to care before it fully understands.

That is why the most effective productions often focus on the characters at the edge of competition: the executive trying to hold a franchise together, the reserve player afraid of being forgotten, the agent negotiating a future, the family in the stands or the town whose identity depends on a club.

The match provides stakes, but the surrounding lives provide entry.

Not every viewer of Ted Lasso will begin following English football. Not every Running Point subscriber will watch the NBA. A direct line between a television episode and a new fan is difficult to prove.

But popularisation does not begin only when someone buys a ticket. It begins when a person recognises a club name, understands relegation, becomes curious about women's football, searches for a Formula One driver or discovers that a basketball franchise is a complicated business as well as a team.

A sports story succeeds when the audience begins to care before it fully understands. The match provides stakes, but the surrounding lives provide entry.

Film and television reduce the distance between the uninitiated viewer and the established fan. They offer people a character to follow until they are ready to follow the sport itself.

And sometimes the invented story becomes inseparable from the real game.

A fictional boxer gives Philadelphia a sporting monument. A film about a British-Indian girl becomes part of women's football history. A drama about baseball statistics changes the vocabulary of recruitment. A comedy about an improbable coach makes millions of viewers feel at home in an imaginary English club.

The screen does not merely reflect sporting culture. It builds entrances into it.

Before many of us understand the rules, choose a team or attend a match, somebody tells us a story.

That is often where fandom begins.